Beating the Averages

Paul Graham on Beating the Averages:

« If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble. »

¶ 05:02PM (via kottke.org)

Pragmatic Starter Kit

Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas who wrote The Pragmatic Programmer have a new series of books out called The Pragmatic Starter Kit. The first two titles, available in print and electronic versions, cover source control with CVS and unit testing with JUnit.
¶ 05:04PM

Ned Batchelder has links to a few articles related to Cargo cult engineering, a topic I first read about in a March 2000 article by Steve McConnell.
¶ 05:17PM

Version Control with Subversion: HTML and PDF work-in-progress versions of a free book about Subversion (to be published by O'Reilly.)
¶ 05:36PM

Useful for integrating into web applications: htmlArea, a WYSIWYG editor replacement for any <textarea> field.
¶ 05:53PM (via Bedeviled Mojo Slop)

Auto catch up for new feeds added to WELL Blogs

I made a change to the script yesterday so that when an RSS feed is requested for the first time we effectively do a catch up on that feed and the items fetched that time are not visible on the page. The idea here is to prevent too many old entries being shown, kind of like how a WELL conference is marked as seen the first time you visit it. Any new posts entered after that first time should appear.
¶ 11:47PM in WELL Blogs

Directories and Weblogs

Dave Winer, three years ago today:

« Authoring a directory is a lot like maintaining a weblog. On a weblog you post on a timely basis, but links fall off the bottom. On a directory you save the valuable non-time-based links. There's the fundamental difference between a weblog and a directory. A weblog has the current stuff, and a directory has the permanent stuff. Connecting the two structures is an interesting user interface problem, and a social one. I have to prime the pump, to get people interested in doing their own directories, I guess I have to create directory envy. »

I use a combination of directories and weblogs for keeping track of things on the web. Of course as better search and the use hierarchical categories become more widespread in weblogs the distiction becomes a bit blurred.
¶ 05:22PM

cgi_buffer

Add one line of code to your CGI scripts and make them cacheable. cgi_buffer is a group of libraries (for Perl, Python and PHP) that automatically handle performance-improving HTTP features that most Web servers don't implement (at least for scripts.)
¶ 05:54PM (via diveintomark b-links)

WELL Blogs launched

It's now up and running at: wellblogs.josephson.org

It shows excerpts from posts sorted chronologically and indicates which blog they are from. I've been testing it for a week or two using 4 or 5 blogs.

There is also an RSS feed for the WELL blogs page itself at: wellblogs.josephson.org/rss.xml
¶ 06:44PM in WELL Blogs

MONAD

MONAD: the new Command Shell that will be in Longhorn.
¶ 11:49AM

Comparator: Compare the Rendering of a Page in IE and Mozilla

Comparator, a utility for comparing the rendering of pages in Internet Explorer and Gecko.
¶ 03:14PM

Marc Miller claims to have written the first WinFX application in SML

Marc Miller claims to have written the first WinFX application in SML.
¶ 09:23AM

10 most violated homepage design guidelines

Jakob Nielsen covers the 10 most violated homepage design guidelines.
¶ 09:23AM

Brent Simmons: how to make money developing OSX applications.
¶ 09:31AM

Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent

news.com: Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent.
¶ 02:27PM

eBay SDK Article on OnDotNet.com

Article by Jeffrey McManus about using the eBay SDK.
¶ 09:13AM

Running multiple versions of IE on the same installation of Windows

Previously thought impossible: IIRC, IE4 setup provided a way to co-exist with IE3 but since then it hasn't been thought possible to
run multiple versions of IE under a single installation of Windows (which would be useful for compatibility testing, obviously). This page shows how to do it.
¶ 08:39AM

ProFont

ProFont is a monospaced font optimised for using displaying source code especially in small sizes. (O and 0; 1, l and I are easy to distinguish and things like that.)
¶ 09:01AM (via Joel on Software)

EasyMock is a library to help create mock objects that aid in your unit testing.
¶ 05:35PM

Robert Scoble wants blogger postcards

Send them to: Robert Scoble; c/o Microsoft Corporation; One Microsoft Way; Redmond, WA, USA 98052.
¶ 09:23AM

A WELL bloggers group blog?

I recently remembered about xian's suggestion for creating a web page that combines posts to weblogs by members of the WELL. I've now made a start on this.
¶ 11:39PM in WELL Blogs

NET Developer's Journal: Borland Delphi 8 Simplifies Transition to .NET Framework.
¶ 10:25AM

The meaning of shareware.
¶ 10:42AM

Rich Client Apps

Tim Bray makes the case that users aren't asking for rich client apps. Robert Scoble:

« Heh, if you can find an end user that even knows what a rich client app is I'd be suprised. Tim, you're asking the wrong questions. »

¶ 03:36PM

Sortable tables in JavaScript

Sortable tables in JavaScript. Could by handy :-)
¶ 05:25PM

Single User Source Control

Eric Sink: Source Control for One
¶ 10:49PM

REST and SOAP

jeff barr says amazon's rest web services are 6 times faster than soap
given the choice, developers prefer rest over soap 5 to 1
¶ 10:45AM

Mark Pilgrim is also using Cheetah and links to smart vs. dumb templates.
¶ 04:43PM